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    Home Latest News

      Up Close with the Latest Longhorn Build

      By
      Loyd Case
      -
      May 6, 2004
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        At this years Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Microsoft released another sneak peek at its next generation operating system, code-named Longhorn. PC Magazine, along with the rest of the WinHEC attendees, received a DVD with the 4072 build. This preview is based on that build.

        The latest build is similar to the one released at Microsofts Professional Developers Conference last September. A few things have been added, though not all are obvious. At first blush, Longhorn appears to retain the look and feel of the earlier versions except for some new background art.

        The bulky-looking taskbar still consumes considerable real estate on the right side of the screen, though you can minimize the bar. The overall user interface has been streamlined a bit and made more consistent. Longhorn builds a contact manager into the operating system itself and even allows users to pin frequent contacts to the taskbar.

        Although the surface looks placid, some goodies lurk beneath. As Neowin (http://www.neowin.net) reported, the Avalon desktop window manager (DWM) is incorporated into this build of Longhorn, though its inactive on startup.

        Avalon will be the replacement for the existing Windows desktop graphics technologies, and is built on XML and DirectX. Avalon itself is an API framework, much like the GDI interface on which the current Windows desktops are built.

        The Avalon DWM alters the look and feel of the desktop just a bit. On the surface, the changes dont seem dramatic. The “bugs”8212the minimize/maximize/close buttons8212at the top right change a bit in appearance. The windows themselves, however, are now individual 3D surfaces.

        Each window, when layered above another, appears to float on top of the one below, complete with a soft drop shadow. When you hit ALT-TAB to task switch, all the windows suddenly tilt inward and neatly layer. This allows you to see all the windows more clearly.

        DWM is not without bugs. The desktop manager is enabled in a DOS shell screen, and resides in windowsi386. You type “SBCTL Start” to turn on DWM. As soon as you do, all the text and icons in the taskbar disappear, and youre left with a featureless expanse of gray.

        These slick, 3D-accelerated features come at a cost, too. Even on our testbed, a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 running a high-end ATI Radeon 9800XT graphics card, the Avalon DWM seemed just a tad sluggish. Additional cool features, like the compositing manager, werent available yet.

        The 3D features require DirectX 9.0, and this version of the OS ships with DirectX 9.0b, unlike the fall preview, which only had DirectX 8. In fact, we were able to run 3DMark 2003 with no problems using the default Radeon 9800XT driver embedded in build 4072. (You can read more about Longhorns anticipated 3D nature here.)

        We observed another interesting feature, called castles, although we werent able to test it. Think of castles as “mini-domains” you can create on a home network. Unlike full domains, these require no domain server. They have many of the features of full domains and build in greater security than the workgroup paradigm familiar to most users of home networks.

        To read the full story and view the slideshow of Longhorn screen shots,

        click here.

        Loyd Case
        Loyd Case came to computing by way of physical chemistry. He began modestly on a DEC PDP-11 by learning the intricacies of the TROFF text formatter while working on his master's thesis. After a brief, painful stint as an analytical chemist, he took over a laboratory network at Lockheed in the early 80's and never looked back. His first 'real' computer was an HP 1000 RTE-6/VM system.In 1988, he figured out that building his own PC was vastly more interesting than buying off-the-shelf systems ad he ditched his aging Compaq portable. The Sony 3.5-inch floppy drive from his first homebrew rig is still running today. Since then, he's done some programming, been a systems engineer for Hewlett-Packard, worked in technical marketing in the workstation biz, and even dabbled in 3-D modeling and Web design during the Web's early years.Loyd was also bitten by the writing bug at a very early age, and even has dim memories of reading his creative efforts to his third grade class. Later, he wrote for various user group magazines, culminating in a near-career ending incident at his employer when a humor-impaired senior manager took exception at one of his more flippant efforts. In 1994, Loyd took on the task of writing the first roundup of PC graphics cards for Computer Gaming World -- the first ever written specifically for computer gamers. A year later, Mike Weksler, then tech editor at Computer Gaming World, twisted his arm and forced him to start writing CGW's tech column. The gaming world -- and Loyd -- has never quite recovered despite repeated efforts to find a normal job. Now he's busy with the whole fatherhood thing, working hard to turn his two daughters into avid gamers. When he doesn't have his head buried inside a PC, he dabbles in downhill skiing, military history and home theater.

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